Solar Striker

The Good
Solar Striker is a vertical scrolling shooter. Produced by Gunpei Yokoi with credited direction to Satoshi Okada and Keisuke Terasaki as the first shooter ever on the Game Boy. All of these are Nintendo people, though I believe they didn't have any involvement in the actual development of the game (maybe a word here and there). As an usual practice for those days the big N hired the sub-contractor Minakuchi Engineering to make the game. This inner Japan studio is kind of famous for being a mysterious development company; they usually sold their services and didn't ask for the credit (or just couldn't get it, who knows). They did a lot of GB ports for Capcom's games back in the day.

In any case Solar Striker is an standard, pretty orthodox shooter. The power-ups upgrade your weapon, making it four times stronger, there are no bombs or wipe screens. If you die, your weapon is decreased by one level. And you earn extra lives every 50k points.

The graphics are very simple, early GB style... With some nice details in the backgrounds (easily it could have been just empty space... but is not). The design of sprites, enemies and ship, are the most basic triangles, circles and squares with legs you can do (though they get a little better by the end); same with the bosses. But the scrolling is smooth and you get lots of enemies and their bullets without any lag. The enemy patterns are predictable, all of them are capable of throwing just one bullet, and the bosses feel a bit samey.

The movement on your ship is swell, and you can just keep the firing button held down for rapid fire (which is always nice to see on a shooter).

The Bad
Is pretty dull, uncreative and thus a bit boring.

The Bottom Line
Solar Striker succeeds in bringing variety to the early Game Boy library. It's a simple but solid shooter.